"I think Dianne's the legitimate extension of all of the good things that have gone on before,
from Ethel Waters to Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah and Carmen...
She is earth mother, lover, she is the hurt child, she manages to get inside each one of those things."
Joe Williams (to Zan Stewart), Down Beat , 1997

With her strong, agile voice, rhythmic virtuosity, and improvisational ease, Dianne Reeves was clearly born of jazz. But music, she feels, should have "no boundaries," so her singing draws upon a world of influences: Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean; gospel and r&b; classic and contemporary pop. As with Carmen McRae and Billie Holiday, Reeves' musicianship is tied to a powerful storytelling instinct--one that surfaced in 1982, when her autobiographical hit Better Days conveyed the message of hope that sparks all her work.

A Blue Note/EMI recording artist since 1987, she has earned a recent Grammy win and multiple nominations as well as the admiration of Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall, who says: "I feel better about my own legacy for signing her." Both he and Reeves can look with pride at the vast international audience her albums (eleven to date) have created. It stretches from New York to London to Berlin to Brazil to Japan, where she sings regularly at the Blue Note clubs in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka. In 1997, a return appearance at New Morning, the pre-eminent jazz club of Paris, resulted in the best-selling CD New Morning, issued by French Blue Note.

But the greatest tribute to her artistry comes from the musicians-- Clark Terry, Sergio Mendes, Gene Harris, Harry Belafonte--who have actively championed her. "Whenever I'm around Dianne, it's special," says the great saxophonist James Moody. "I dig her all the time."

The dignity of her singing is rooted in her childhood. Born in Detroit in 1956 and raised in Denver, Reeves lost her father to cancer when she was two. But the women in her family--her grandmother, her mother (a nurse), her aunt, her sister Sharon--helped give her an unshakable sense of fortitude. "They're all fighters," she says. "All my life I heard about their problems at work, which were always discussed around the children -what someone had said, how they dealt with it. They're amazing to me."

Music was another gift from the family. Her father had been a singer; her mother played trumpet; an uncle, Charles Burrell, worked as a bassist with the Colorado Symphony. Further inspiration came from her cousin George Duke, the celebrated keyboardist, composer, and arranger (as well as her future record producer). As a child Reeves studied piano, the source of her rich harmonic awareness.

Her artistic and emotional grounding helped her bear the pressures of junior high, where she and other black children in Denver participated in one of the first bussing programs. Traveling to hostile white neighborhoods in the late '60s, they found themselves thrust into a pressure-cooker of racism, ignited mostly by parents who had been conditioned in a less enlightened time. "It dawned on me that this was truly ignorance--ignorance in not wanting to understand one another," Reeves explains. Then thirteen, she joined other students--black, white, and Hispanic--in trying to educate their elders. She participated in sit-ins, spoke at a school assembly, even sang in a concert organized by the children to show how music cut across racial boundaries. "Fortunately it all ended in a positive way," she says. "People started to look at themselves and be kind of ashamed of the way they reacted."

Listening to the radio, she began to see how pop artists used music to tell stories about their lives. "Even if was a song with a nice groove by Stevie Wonder or the O'Jays," she says, "you also got a lot of information about life." The voice itself could hold wondrous technical possibilities, as she learned when she heard the 1972 album Sarah Vaughan and Michel Legrand.
At sixteen, Reeves put her training on display when she sang with her high school band at a National Association of Jazz Educators convention in Chicago. One of the people who heard her was trumpeter Clark Terry, who became the first in her long line of illustrious mentors. He invited her to sing with his All-Star groups, which included Al Grey, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, and Tommy Flanagan.
After a few years of singing in local clubs she moved to Los Angeles in 1976, only to find that straight-ahead jazz singing was at its commercial low. That's when she learned to stretch her talent in other directions. She joined the Latin fusion group Caldera in which she made a lasting friend: keyboardist Eduardo (Eddie) del Barrio, with whom she has co-written some of her most powerful songs. Reeves also sang with Night Flight, an experimental jazz band led by pianist Billy Childs, who became her musical director for ten years. "Billy gave me license to go anywhere musically," she said in an interview with Herb Wong, her first record producer. "It wasn't just a backup group for me, it was a unified group which gave me a basis for my future."
Wong signed her to his Palo Alto label, for whom she recorded her first two albums, Welcome to My Love (1982) and For Every Heart (1985) (anthologized in the Blue Note CD The Palo Alto Sessions). During that time she wrote and recorded "Better Days", a stirring recollection of her grandmother. Since then Reeves has expanded the song into a gospelish narrative about her youth. Holly Bass of the Washington Post called it "a picture of black Southern life as vivid as any you'd find in a story penned by Maya Angelou or J. California Cooper."
But at Palo Alto, she says, she still hadn't found her own voice. "There's only one Sarah, Ella, and Carmen, and I needed to do my own thing," Reeves told Milwaukee journalist Tina Maples.
After moving back to Los Angeles in 1987, Reeves became the first vocalist signed to the newly reactivated Blue Note label. In Dianne Reeves (1987) and Never Too Far (1989) she focused on pop-r&b, but thereafter gave her eclecticism full reign. I Remember (1991) ranges from jazz standards ("Softly", "As in a Morning Sunrise", "Love for Sale") to Latin jazz (Mongo Santamaria's "Afro-Blue") to Stephen Sondheim's poignant title song. Art and Survival (EMI, 1994), a fiery autobiographical album of pop, soul, and jazz, includes her gospel-tinged original Come to the River. Quiet After the Storm (1995) offers jazz-oriented performances of songs by Joni Mitchell, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, and others; the album won a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. The Grand Encounter (1996) features jazz giants Joe Williams, Clark Terry, Harry "Sweets" Edison, James Moody, Phil Woods, Toots Thielemans, and Kenny Barron. That Day (1997) finds her in a reflective ballad mood, accompanied by a jazz trio led by drummer Terri Lynn Carrington.
Her third Grammy nomination went to her release, Bridges (1999), which found her back with her cousin George Duke and all-star band with Mulgrew Miller, Billy Childs, Terri Lynn Carrington, Kenny Garrett, and Brian Blades, performing a mixture of originals and contemporary standards by Leonard Cohen, Peter Gabriel and Joni Mitchell.
In the year approaching the Millennium, Dianne expanded her creativity by joining as a guest of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in several special Duke Ellington projects, including a concert at the White House, a TV series on PBS and a tour of the United States. She was also featured in a special on the CBS Sunday Morning Show as well as with the Boston Pops on PBS' Great Performances.
Reeves once more lives in Denver, but spends much of her life on the road. "I really believe in touring," she says. "It's the only way you can get close to your audience." She remains stubbornly adventurous, despite the criticism of jazz purists. "I really try to let the critics know: Look, you have to allow me the opportunity to grow whether you like it or not," she says. "It's part of who I am. It doesn't mean that I'm abandoning jazz. I've just found different ways to say what I really feel."
Dianne's Grammy winning album, In the Moment, is the first live album she has done and was prompted by requests from her many fans who have been thrilled and moved by her concert performances. She began the New Year with the release of The Calling, Celebrating Sarah Vaughan, recorded with full orchestra, and debuted the program at NY's Avery Fisher Hall. Also set are appearances with the Montreal Symphony, Hollywood Bowl and the Colorado Symphony.

September 2002